Five debut authors. Five books. One big dance toward publication.

editing

This week we’re talking about edit letters, and today I’m going to talk about what to do WITH your edit letter…concrete strategies to make something that feels overwhelming just a little more manageable. Getting an edit letter is hard. It can sometimes be painful to realize how much work you have left to do. While fishermen sit around comparing the size of the fish they’ve caught, writers…

This week’s topic: the edit letter. Before I published The Queen of Hearts, I’d assumed the edit letter was just that: a letter with some suggested editorial changes, but that turned out not to be the case for me. I never actually got an edit letter. When I got the call from my agent that we had an offer on my book, I was out of the country. Cell…

This post about edit letters is really a post about worldbuilding, because that’s a lot of what my edit letters were about. Oh, there were things about character arcs and pacing and such, too, but much of that went into the manuscript comments. My edit letters, particularly the longest that I received from the first of my two editors, were a lot about world-building. In a successful fantasy novel, the…

The above quote from the inestimable Neil Gaiman is a lot of why I’ve had beta readers since my fanfic days, but have never had a dedicated critique partner in another writer, at least not since leaving school. Writers have a much, much harder time resisting the urge to say how we would do something — which is not always helpful when talking to another writer. I think it can…

I’m so pleased to introduce you to Jennifer Johnson-Blalock of Hyphen Editing and Coaching. I first met Jennifer through Pitch Wars when she was a participating agent, and as a reader, I’m a huge fan of some of the books she’s represented over the years. Jennifer travels the world, reading, editing, and coaching, and if you are in need of a coach of any kind – for editing, for querying,…

A tale of a book, from pen to shelf: November 2011 — Project begins, called simply Aven, as Cass’s 2011 NaNoWriMo project, an attempt to get herself writing creatively again after several years devoted to academia. December 2011 — Cass sets to finishing the draft and polishing it up. July 2012 — Cass scrambles to finish editing her draft in the hopes that it’s fit to be seen and attends a…

Question: So you’ve published your first novel, SMALL ADMISSIONS. I hear you’re working on a second. Has it been easier this time around? I hear the second book is a piece of cake. Answer: A piece of cake? Seriously? Ha. LIMELIGHT TIMELINE April 2015: Sign contract for SMALL ADMISSIONS! Yay! Celebrate. May 2015: Time to start thinking about that new book! Do that, meaning… sit and think. Gaze off into space….

I recently read a thread on facebook about receiving the dreaded edit letter and the hatred, the pain, heartache, and tears it induces. In short, an edit like is the psychopathic killer ready to slice to this shit out of your expectations and pre-conceived notions on what the final version of your book will be like. However, I’m one of those weirdos that LOVE receiving edit letters. I appreciate anything that…

This week, the Deb’s are chatting about the editing of our novels. As writers, we pick up tricks of the trade as we go along. We never stop learning and improving. I like that about our industry. While revising my novel, BECOMING BONNIE, I felt like I had ample opportunities to grow (i.e. it required lots of editing). But it was in that messy, chaotic state of tackling my edits…

Caged Eyes may have taken me a decade to write, but I can summarize the process easily: expand and contract. My first draft was a factual recount, a straight linear narrative one might read in some kind of textbook. It made for a terrible memoir, I assure you. Over several additional drafts, I went to the opposite extreme. I added details, dialogue, and reflection, and suddenly my memoir doubled in…